Clay Aiken has always seemed like the most bewildered of the "American Idol" graduates — his insta-fame cut with a bit of "What-just-happened?" caution, his music a hit-or-miss split between what he wants and what he's supposed to want.

Five years later, on his second full album of originals, "On My Way Here," Aiken is starting to figure it out.

He is at his best when he wraps his big voice around big ballads, usually ones with big messages attached. He maximizes the drama on "As Long as We're Here" to poignant effect, with booming phrases that would make Celine Dion proud, followed by vulnerable questioning that emo leading men would secretly admire. He undersells "Something About Us" as if it were a classic Johnny Mathis ballad and fills "The Real Me" with a quavering uncertainty that makes it work.

Aiken turns the title track, by Ryan Tedder of OneRepublic, into one of those ballads that could have been written anytime in the past 30 years or, probably, in the next 30. But when he tries his hand at songs that sound timelier — the poppy "Falling," a clone of his hit "Invisible," or the Pink-ish "Ashes" — he starts to lose it.

As much as his record company would want him to be, Aiken isn't a crossover pop star. He's a male Celine Dion, a nerdier Michael Buble, a new-millennium Barry Manilow, and there's nothing wrong with that. The sooner he embraces that, the better his albums will sound. With "On the Way Here,"

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he's not quite there.